


the ghost and good queen val

by Wildehack (tyleet)



Series: Thor Works [8]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Multi, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Pseudo-Incest, fixit fic, honestly egregiously sappy for me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-12
Updated: 2018-05-12
Packaged: 2019-05-05 14:38:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14620800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyleet/pseuds/Wildehack
Summary: “What,” she says, her heart racing, “was that.”“What was what?” Korg asks, frowning up at her. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”Valkyrie squints suspiciously at the ship.“Oh my god,” Korg says. “You did! You saw a ghost!”





	the ghost and good queen val

**Author's Note:**

> INFINITY WAR SPOILERS, duh

They learn the Ark is destroyed and the King and his heir are most certainly dead two days into the refueling mission, when the first escape pod gets into contact. Valkyrie has lost her world twice before, and this time she is able to swallow everything down and shove past Korg, who has two stony hands pressed to his mouth, to get at the nav controls. They turn the Commodore around and start picking up the survivors.  
  
The count, when they finally make one, goes like this: the King is dead, the Prince is dead, Heimdall is dead, the Hulk is dead, any adult who could wield so much as a harvest scythe in defense of their people is dead, and the Ark is so much rubble floating in space.  
  
“Well,” Korg says falteringly, after she realizes she’s now the leader of Asgard by process of elimination and promptly punches the side of the ship. “The children are our future, so--at least we’ve got a future?”  
  
The escape pods are full of children and those too old or wounded to fight. Mostly children. The responsibility almost overwhelms her for a second, and she has to take a few deep breaths. A thousand years of looking after no one but herself--and not even doing that very well, to be brutally fair--and now she’s the only thing standing between a couple hundred kids and the whole uncaring universe. She flexes her hand, her wrist unaccountably throbbing from the punch, and says: “This is the worst fucking day I’ve had in a long time.”  
  
“Sleep on it,” Korg says, running a worried hand over Miek’s head. “The sun will come out tomorrow. Only hopefully not Heris 4, since there’s a civil war orbiting that one, and they love bombing outsiders. Maybe Raxan 2? We’ve definitely got to land somewhere tomorrow, since we don’t have the stores to feed this many people, and the pods are gonna run out of fuel in a day or so.”  
  
She groans.  
  
*  
  
The first sighting happens a week later, after half the universe melts into dust.

Their pathetic huddle of ship and escape pods is mostly spared, except for a few of the ex-gladiators, who traumatize the kids even more by shuddering into nothing right in front of their eyes. Probably whatever cosmic evil caused it didn’t even notice a handful of Asgardians made it out alive to begin with. They find their way to an equally traumatized Raxan 2, whose coping mechanism of choice is public violence, which is at least familiar. Devastated crowds flock to the arena, comforted by the sight of someone smashed to pulp in the name of whatever strange gods they have. She spends the first day fighting for eight hours straight so she can buy the kids some goddamn bread to eat with her winnings. Korg, who actually has practice fighting in a prize arena, but was disqualified on account of his size, offers her helpful advice and ice packs.  
  
Twilight finds them sitting on the dirt outside the Commodore with its pitiful fleet of escape pods tucked alongside it, watching the kids play with twigs. The plan, so much as they have one, is for Valkyrie to keep winning fights until they can purchase a second ship, pack all the kids into it, and get the hell outta dodge, to use a Sakaarian phrase. Valkyrie’s spitting blood into a cup while Miek ties an ice pack to her ribs and Korg gives her feedback on the fight (“very nice form, but not every planet will let you fight that dirty. You also need a signature catchphrase. Cowabunga’s a classic”), when she looks up and sees Loki leaning against the side of the ship, staring right at her.  
  
She startles badly, sending Miek to the dirt, but by the time she gets to her feet, Loki vanishes.  
  
“What,” she says, her heart racing, “was that.”  
  
“What was what?” Korg asks, frowning up at her. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”  
  
Valkyrie squints suspiciously at the ship.  
  
“Oh my god,” Korg says. “You did! You saw a ghost!”  
  
“I didn’t see anything,” Valkyrie snaps, but she doesn’t let her guard down the rest of the night.  
  
*  
  
The next morning she’s drinking coffee with Korg and two of the sharpest grannies left in their little refugee camp, calculating exactly how many fights she’ll have to win before they can buy something sturdy enough to get them to Midgard--or somewhere, anywhere better than this shitheap of a planet--when Loki appears again in a flash, his eyes bloodshot and his face mottled, one pale hand reaching out for her. He’s gone in the next instant, after she’s already thrown her cup at him.  
  
“Didn’t you see that?” she demands, looking between the shocked grannies.  
  
“See what, my Lady?” one of them ventures, looking deeply concerned.  
  
“You’re not going crazy, are you?” Korg asks. “Not that I have a problem with crazy. But if you could possibly hold off on that for another month, that might be for the collective best.”  
  
“I’m not crazy,” she says, and points at the coffee dripping down the wall. “Loki was there. Right there.”  
  
There’s a palpable shift in the grannies’ concern.  
  
“Oh my dear,” one of them says, sounding choked up.  
  
“The Norns are testing us,” the other says, looking sympathetic. She puts a hand to her heart and bows, the way one might bow to royalty, before both grannies get up and head for the door. “But they always have a purpose.”  
  
Valkyrie stares after them.  
  
“They think it’s the grief,” Korg says wisely.  
  
“It’s bloody well _not_ ,” she says, but Korg gives her a sympathetic pat on the shoulder anyway.  
  
The rumors travel fast among the survivors, who Korg correctly decides are intensely interested in her supposedly broken heart so they can be distracted from their own. The Last Valkyrie loved the prince, and now she sees echoes of him wherever she goes, poor thing.  
  
Valkyrie would love to argue, but she _was_ bedding Loki, and she _does_ start seeing him everywhere.  
  
“Also you’re shattered, Miek says,” Korg translates.

“I’m shattered from all the _violence_ ,” she protests to Miek. “Not from heartbreak!”  
  
Miek chitters at her, unconvinced.  
  
Poor me, she thinks.  
  
*  
  
There wasn’t anything sentimental about it. Loki wasn’t her _lover_ . But they were stuck on a spaceship for over a year, and it was pretty clear from the beginning that she could pick whichever prince she wanted, since one had apparently fantasized about Valkyries since he was so high and the other very plainly wanted her to crush his head between her thighs. No chance of choosing both without risking the delicate ecosystem of a shipboard nation and their freshly stitched up brotherhood, and Thor frankly seemed the type to get attached, so she went with the one who could magically grow a cock or a cunt depending on his mood. No contest, honestly.  
  
She spent the next year helping the King of Asgard--Norns help them all--reconstruct an entire system of government more or less from scratch, as every senior member of the military and the monarchy save the All-Seeing and Odin’s overgrown children was killed during Ragnarok. She wrestled with the Hulk, diced with Thor, drank with the All-Seeing, and tapped her thigh with the flat of a knife while Korg placidly attempted to convince the ragtag Council of Elders--all former farmers and cloth merchants, before Hela--to instate a social democracy instead of maintaining the divine right of kings. And two or three times a week she bent Loki over a desk and had her wicked way with him.  
  
It doesn’t _seem_ like the kind of relationship that would tie his spirit to hers and prevent him from joining his loved ones in Valhalla after his gruesome murder by a mad god, but apparently there’s no accounting for taste.

*  
  
“Everywhere” becomes annoyingly accurate.  
  
Loki is there when she wakes from sleep, bloodshot eyes inches from hers, and vanishes like a mist when she swings at him.  
  
Loki reaches out for her from the marketplace where she’s buying bread for the kids, and disappears when she gets close.  
  
Loki appears as a reflection in the chrome exterior of the Commodore, yelling something she can’t hear, and when she turns around he’s gone.  
  
Loki watches her lose for the first time in the arena. Mostly because she’s distracted enough by his presence in the ring that she misses the sword hilt coming right for her skull.  
  
He materializes once when she’s washing her hair--she rinses the suds out of her eyes, and Loki flickers into being a mere foot away from her, washed in a purple light that is certainly not emanating from her fresher. His eyes are still bloody; his neck rests at a terrible angle.  
  
“What do you want from me,” she hisses.  
  
It’s hard to tell expression in a face that obviously dead, but she thinks his eyes narrow in frustration. Then he reaches out with one spectral hand and touches her wrist. She doesn’t feel his touch, exactly, but her wrist does pulse violently with pain, like he’d broken it instead of brushed it.  
  
She gasps and yanks it protectively in toward her chest, and he sighs and dissipates.  
  
She rubs her wrist, and then blinks and looks at it more closely. A glowing rune has appeared on the delicate underside of her wrist, a perfect match to the Valkyrie tattoo on her other arm. It looks Asgardian, but it isn’t writing--just a snaking loop, shining like a star against her skin.  
  
“Well,” she says blankly, “that can’t be good news.”  
  
*  
  
“It’s Frigga’s thread,” Gudrun says, adamantly. “The mark of the queen.” All the grannies have gathered around Valkyrie’s arm, attempting to suss out whatever kind of haunting this is by piecing together whatever backwater knowledge a few thousand years in Asgard’s vineyards and farmhouses might have given them, and Gudrun is the oldest and tiredest of them all. “The old queen,” she amends, and there’s a gasp from their surrounding audience.  
  
“What are you saying?” Valkyrie asks, suspiciously. “Frigga’s sending me a message, somehow?”  
  
“Don’t you see,” one of the other grannies--Ranna, maybe--bursts out. “The king is dead, and his heir--his _magical_ heir--returns from death to mark you with the sigil of the queen.” Her face is shining. “We have all known it to be true, but now the crown itself confirms it--Asgard is yours.”  
  
Valkyrie buckles her vambrace down over the rune, which still twinges sullenly when touched, and tries her damndest to get the grannies up off their knees.  
  
“If it helps, I still think it could be psychosomatic,” Korg assures her. “Also, I still don’t believe in the monarchy, much less one that passes representative power on to someone based on how nice they were between the sheets.”

She groans.

*  
  
Loki never told her anything about his mother.  
  
Not that he ever told her _much_ , really, back on the Ark. There was a certain friendliness between them, of course--when you trust someone with your body, trusting them in other ways is sort of inevitable, unless you’re making a deliberate effort to resist--but it wasn’t ever a big deal. Loki drank with her, magicking up bottles of liquor from the aether after the Grandmaster’s stores went dry. His shoulder brushed hers companionably in the hall. She missed dinner one day, and he threw her an apple a few hours later on the bridge. They were friendly, to be sure, but honestly she spent more time with Thor, knew Thor better. Liked Thor better, and didn’t make a secret of it.  
  
The closest Loki ever came to sharing personal intimacies--aside from the fun kind--was when she asked where the hell the liquor was coming from, since she’d never had anything like Kentucky bourbon before.  
  
“Oh, I stole this from Stark years ago,” he said airily. “I keep it in a folded up pocket dimension--honestly, it’s hardly advanced witchcraft. Even Thor could do it, if he put his mind to it.”  
  
“What else do you keep in there?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. It was hard to imagine filling an entire pocket dimension with booze, even for her.  
  
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” he said, but they’d already gone through a few bottles of bourbon, so he gave her a real answer, too, his voice deepening slightly. “Books, mostly. I’ve got most of the library of Asgard in there, which I would love to chalk up to foresight, but honestly it was just greed. I’m a terrible lender.”  
  
“Booze and books,” she said, gently mocking. “You must have been a fun child.”  
  
“A riot of laughs,” he said, and poured them each another pint. “But I kept more of Asgard than that. Trinkets from the palace, some things that belonged to my mother. A few magical curiosities. I have one of Idunn’s apples in there, I think. The stasis field should keep it from rotting.”  
  
She raised her eyebrows. “You’re not going to give it to the king? He could replant the orchard.”  
  
Loki shrugged. “Maybe when we get wherever we’re going.” A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. “Or when I decide he’s earned it.”  
  
She laughed, and he tugged her agreeably close, and they let the subject drop.  
  
Honestly it was all she wanted. He was hungry for her, and he was even better in bed than the gossip mill on Sakaar had suggested he would be--there was the shapeshifting, sure, but there was also the frost giant thing, and the magic thing, and the enthusiasm for rough handling thing. There were a lot of things, and she didn’t mind any of them.  
  
Every so often he’d come to watch while she and the Hulk sparred with Thor, a neutral expression on his face--except for when either of them got the edge on Thor, at which point he couldn’t stop himself smiling. He grinned when she won, and when she lost--when Thor threw her joyfully into walls and went inexorably for her weak spots and won the heart of every Asgardian in the room with his sheer physical grace, all that golden power undimmed by her victories--he’d sling a towel at her, and it would be as cold as a frost giant’s palm. The courtesy would catch her off-balance, but never too off-balance, because then he’d insult her form, and point out that she wouldn’t do half so well against a villain wielding seidr, and then she’d have to drag him into the room and prove him wrong.  
  
Thor always stayed to watch when she fought Loki, and most of the fight she was thinking more about _that_ than anything else. Thor and Loki were insufferable about each other, and apparently shared an even more insufferable history--neither of them would spar with each other, even in jest. They were like that in general--vicious and careful with each other by turns, as if they had no idea what kind of balance they should strike, now that they were homeless orphans alone in the universe. But Thor went quiet when she grappled with Loki, and Loki shone under the attention, predictable as always.  
  
She was better than Loki, and just as filthy a cheat, but he had more tools at his disposal. She hooked a leg under his knees and swung her elbow into his throat, and he dissolved into mist, reappearing ten feet away, gasping for breath, and sent splinters of ice hurtling towards her. Thor watched, rapt, as Valkyrie swung her sword into illusion after illusion, and finally closed her eyes and grabbed Loki out of thin air, knocking him to the ground and smashing her fist into his ribcage. She pulled the punch, of course, but it landed hard enough that Loki had to suck in a wounded sounding breath before catching her with his thighs and flipping her over, a dagger materializing at her throat--but of course she’d prepared for that, and pricked the vulnerable skin of his inner thigh with the knife she’d pressed up against his femoral artery, only one good push away from his death. 

They stayed there for a long moment, Loki half-kneeling over her, thighs parted over her waist, both their chests heaving as they gulped for air, knives steady in their hands. Thor’s eyes seared into her, and something in her shivered at the heat of it.

“A draw,” Thor pronounced after a long moment, his voice oddly low. She turned to look up at him, and the look on his face made everything in her go tight--chest, stomach, throat.  
  
“We must have a rematch sometime,” Loki murmured, and although she didn’t check, she was sure he was also looking at Thor.  
  
*  
  
The rune’s appearance is enough of an unofficial coronation for the people to start calling her Majesty.  
  
“Unfortunate, but I suppose they need continuity,” Korg says. “You are a moldering relic of a dying institution, though, I hope you know.”  
  
“I’m not the bloody queen,” Valkyrie snaps at him, but it doesn’t stop the grannies from bowing, or the kids from calling her Good Queen Val, or any of them--Korg included--from looking at her with the naked combination of trust and hope that they used to give Thor. She scratches the rune, which itches constantly, like the magic hasn’t fully settled into her body yet.  
  
She remembers Frigga, but only faintly--the king’s new wife, wed after he put aside Hela’s mother. All the rest of them, kids included, remember everything about Frigga--that she was beautiful, that she was good and wise, that she came to the festival every year and brought gifts for the children. The only halfway useful thing anyone can remember is that Frigga was a powerful witch, and Loki learned his magic from her.  
  
“What kinds of magic did she work?” Valkyrie asks Gudrun, desperately.  
  
Gudrun frowns. “Well,” she says, “I can’t rightly say. Most of it was secret.”  
  
“Then how do you know she was a witch?” Valkyrie demands.  
  
“The tapestries,” Astrid, a child of barely twenty who comes up to Valkyrie’s hip, says immediately. “You could always tell from the tapestries.”  
  
Frigga, it seems, wove stories into tapestries: the past, the present, and the future.  
  
“They were realer than anything,” Gudrun says wistfully. “You looked at her landscapes, and you _felt_ the sea spray, you _smelled_ it, you knew yourself exactly as you were five hundred years ago--for an instant you _were_ the girl you had been five hundred years ago. The queen’s works were realer than we are.”  
  
“All gone now, I guess,” Astrid says, matter of fact in the way children are, and even Valkyrie feels a dull pang of loss, although she never saw Frigga’s work to miss it.

She looks down at her arm, and the silver loop of thread shines up at her.  
  
*  
  
Thor was a good and fair king, although Heimdall would have been better. Thor was strong, but not so strong as Hela. He crackled with magic, but paled in comparison to his advisors, the All-Seeing and a shapeshifting witch. He was the son of Odin, but she had hated Odin, and he was beautiful, but what did she care for beauty? No, Thor was nothing at all, except good and fair and full of a calm, hard-won strength, and she had sworn to leave off serving kings after Odin left her sisters and Ragnhild to die and didn’t bother to execute their murderer, but she served Thor gladly. There was an ember of something in him she didn’t know how to name, but felt deeply, almost against her will, a light in the vast black of the universe.  
  
She could have had him under her that first night, if she’d wanted to. He matched her so effortlessly on Sakaar, and again dispatching Hela’s servants. It would have been very, very good.

But Thor wasn’t the only one she worried might get attached, so she’d ignored those first few looks, the easy chemistry between them, and knocked on the younger brother’s door. Bedding Loki was nearly an act of spite, although she was only spiting herself.  
  
Once, in bed--not in the literal sense, but collapsed in the dark of a supply closet in the metaphorical sense--Loki had traced the line of her shoulder with his index finger, a delicious little trail of cold, and said “He’d still have you, you know.”

“Who would?” she asked coldly, and reached down to pull her pants up.  
  
“My brother,” Loki said, still in that mild, contemplative way. “He’s too noble to mind.”  
  
“If I wanted your brother,” she told him, pulling her belt tight, “I’d have him.”  
  
Loki looked at her with such a perfect expression of surprise that she was sure it was false. “Don’t you?” he asked, and ruined it by curling his lip in a sneer.  
  
She stared at him.  
  
“You’re his most trusted advisor,” he said silkily. “His best warrior. His drinking partner, his friend. Why not have him completely, when you already have the rest of it?”  
  
“You’re jealous,” she said, and laughed, dropping the thigh holster she’d been about to buckle back to the floor. “Of your brother?”  
  
“I am not jealous,” he snapped, and he hadn’t bothered dressing, so he was still in a soft disarray, bared skin pink with use.  
  
“Yes you are,” she said, and stepped into him, pressing him back into the dark wall of the closet. His eyes flashed down to her mouth. “If not of him, then of me.”  
  
“You’re not making any sense,” Loki said breathlessly, as if such things were unheard of in royal houses, stretching his neck to make room for her, nicely pliant. “Which follows, I suppose, if you’re in love with my brother.”  
  
“Don’t be a brat,” she said with an edge to it, and ran the flat of her hand down his stomach, til it rested just above the curve of his pelvic bone. “Do you think he’s good enough with the lightning that he could send a spark right through you?” She scraped the delicate skin with her fingernail to really hammer home the point, and he made an embarrassing sound, and grabbed her hand, pulling it up to his mouth instead.  
  
She laughed at him, and pulled his legs open to expose the cunt he’d magicked himself up a few days earlier, sighing. Loki shuddered and sucked her fingers wet, but when she tried to pull away, he kept going, licking a cool stripe down her palm to her wrist. Then he bit down. She yelped.  
  
“What are you doing, you vampire,” she demanded, and pulled her wrist up, fully expecting it to be bloodied--but the skin was unbroken.  
  
“That’s for suggesting I’d like to fuck my brother,” he said flatly, and she rolled her eyes and kissed him on his liar’s mouth.  
  
“Go ahead and tell me you don’t,” she said, goading him as she worked her fingers back into him. “Tell me how disgusted you would be if this were his hand.”  
  
She had him biting his lip against Thor’s name within fifteen minutes, and grinned up at him, pressing a last kiss to the soft tangle of black hair between his thighs.  
  
“Fine,” he said ungratefully, shuddering against her with an aftershock. “But you’re still in love with him.”  
  
“None of your business,” she told him, not unkindly.  
  
She left him a shivering mess in a closet full of cleaning supplies and strode back out to the life of the ship, where she laughed at Thor and labored beside Thor and watched Thor labor for his people and knew in her soldier’s heart--that young and stupid part of herself that swore to defend the crown, that girl who’d pledged her life to Asgard--that she’d die for her king if he wanted her to. It wasn’t everything she wanted, but it seemed like enough.  
  
And look where that got her.  
  
The king is dead, the prince is dead, Asgard destroyed twice over, and she is queen of the goddamned ruins.  
  
*  
  
Loki doesn’t disappear, just because he’s named her his heir--or his widow--whichever one it is. He appears more often than before, and speaks his soundless words with even more urgency.  
  
He intrudes on her preparation for the night’s fight, wrapping a bandage over the stupid silver mark, a disgusted look on his face, and Korg squawks and aims a flying kick at Loki’s head.  
  
“He looked dead!” Korg exclaims, looking shaken.  
  
“He is dead,” Valkyrie says, and pauses in her warmup. “Hang on a second. You saw him that time, too!”  
  
“Trauma,” Korg says mournfully. “It plays tricks.”  
  
“You aren’t traumatized!” she accuses.  
  
“I could be,” Korg says, although he at least sounds doubtful. “I could be grieving somewhere so deep I don’t even know my own sorrow.”  
  
But Korg isn’t the only one who starts to see him--first it’s one of the kids, whose eyes get round as coins, and then it’s Miek, and then Gudrun. It’s like Loki is gaining strength, despite continuing, visibly, to be dead as a doornail.  
  
“It must have something to do with naming you queen,” Gudrun suggests, frowning at the empty air where Loki had stood a moment before, shouting something none of them could hear. “Perhaps he’s come back to warn us of some evil?”  
  
“What evil could be left to warn us of,” Valkyrie mutters, and immediately regrets it. Their world might have been destroyed, half their population slaughtered and then halved again in the destruction of the Ark, the universe might be dust--their queen could be a drunk with no claim to the throne and their entire people comprised of a few hundred kids and a coterie of elderly nobodies--but if she’s learned one thing over the centuries, it’s that things can _always_ get worse.  
  
“Well, until he learns to communicate properly, we’ve done all we can do,” Korg says with a practical shrug of his shoulders, and she more or less agrees.  
  
The next day, Miek informs them that she’s finally bled enough to pay for another ship--a bigger ship, with enough fuel and supplies to last them to somewhere other than here, if they sell the pods. “He says we’ll get even farther if we sell the Commodore,” Korg translates. “We’ll probably have enough money to refuel on Xandar, without needing to earn anything else.”  
  
She shakes her head, operating on gut instinct. The Commodore’s still faster. If they meet another shipkiller, they should still be able to split up.  
  
They buy an old freighter big enough for everyone to fit, supply it as best they can, park the Commodore on top, and get the hell out of Raxan 2.  
  
Loki visits multiple times a day, looking increasingly put out, and everyone sees him. It’s disturbing at first, since he still looks extremely, horrifically dead, but apparently familiarity breeds contempt, because the kids stop screaming after the first day, and start getting excited whenever he shows up. They immediately swarm him, frantically pulling out rocks and coins and bits of food from their pockets, and toss things wildly in his general direction.  
  
“How exactly does this game work?” she asks Astrid, who just tossed an apple core through Loki’s head, to general cheers.  
  
“It’s twenty points if you get him to blink, your Majesty,” she explains, pink with her triumph, and launches into a complex description of game that mostly involves points for getting any piece of detritus through various body parts belonging to their resident ghost before he evaporates.  
  
Loki gives her a very pointed glare, and she shrugs. Some of the younger kids still think they’re going home. She’s not going to tell them to stop playing. “You want them to stop?” she tells him, crossing her arms over her chest. “Stop being the restless dead, and rest in peace.”  
  
“No, Queen Val!” protests a little boy, looking tearful. “We love Ghost Loki.”  
  
“He’s much better than King Loki,” Astrid agrees.  
  
“I like Frost Giant Loki,” a different little girl says, and that launches an apparently longstanding argument over whether Frost Giant Loki even counts as a Loki, since they only ever saw Bjorn painted blue and pretending to be Loki, and Bjorn’s definitely not a Loki. (“I kind of am, though,” a very little boy who couldn’t be more than fifteen years old says, sticking out his chest self importantly.)  
  
She turns her attention back to the Loki in front of her, still undead and irritated, and realizes he’s jerking his head at the window.  
  
“What?”  she asks, and steps over to the window. The only thing visible is the Commodore, halfway covering the viewscreen. No one’s in there--it’s a waste of fuel to have both ships running at once, when they’ll all fit in the freighter. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking at.”  
  
Loki steps closer to her, his face very serious. He jerks his head at the viewscreen again, and this time when she turns to look, she sees the dark window of the cockpit on the Commodore abruptly shine with rainbow light.  
  
Her heart almost stops.  
  
She doesn’t tell the kids what she saw, in case it was another ghostly trick. She walks right through Loki--who evaporates, finally--and finds herself a suit and a clip.  
  
“Where are you going?” Korg asks, when he sees her stepping into the lock.  
  
“Over to the Commodore,” she says, as lightly as she can. “I’m tired of ghosts.”  
  
“All right,” he says, putting up his hands. “You deserve me-time, I get it. Take as long as you like, unless that’s longer than six hours, because we’ll be passing the Iris nebula then, and pirates notoriously--”  
  
“I’ll be back,” she says, and steps out of the airlock.  
  
*  
  
He’s standing in the darkened cockpit, staring out into space, a giant stone axe at his feet. She realizes it’s not clear from the view that they’re parked on something else--he must have thought the ship was abandoned, dead and empty.  
  
“Thor,” she says, and he turns and sees her. Something in her splits open. She’s lived through three apocalypses, and no one’s ever come _back_ before.  
  
“Sigyn,” he breathes, enormous and golden and _Thor,_ and then he’s embracing her. She grips him back, tight enough to bruise. She can’t get close enough.  
  
“I thought you were dead,” he says into her hair after an endless moment.  
  
“We thought _you_ were dead, you idiot,” she says into his shoulder.  
  
“We?” he asks with raw hope, drawing back far enough that he can look at her, but keeping a strong grip on her arms. She doesn’t let go of him either--after spending so long with the ghost, the sheer physical fact of him feels overwhelmingly important.  
  
“The kids all made it out,” she tells him. “Congratulations, Majesty. The children are the future, so you’ve still got one.”  
  
Thor stares at her for a long moment, and then lets her go, burying his face in his hands. His shoulders shake, once, twice, and then he’s wiping tears away and beaming at her, and she has to grab him again, just to feel that he’s really there.  
  
When they can let each other go, and both of them do some covert sniffling, she leads him back to Asgard.  
  
Astrid’s the first one to see them, and immediately starts screaming that GOOD QUEEN VAL BROUGHT THE KING BACK FROM THE DEAD, and soon the ship is full of semi-hysterical Asgardians. She falls back slightly against the crush of people, and lets Asgard welcome back their king.  
  
“Oh my god,” Korg says to her, in awe. “You did it. You brought back King Doug.”  
  
“I didn’t do anything,” she says, and wipes impatiently at her face, which appears to be damp for some reason. “It was Loki, actually. Loki told me he was here.”  
  
“Where is Loki?” he asks, and she looks around, instinctively expecting he’ll be there to witness what must be, in some part, his victory. But she doesn’t see him.  
  
An odd pit opens up in her stomach.  “I don’t know,” she says.  
  
“Well, maybe that’s a sign,” Korg suggests. “Maybe now he’s finally at peace.”  
  
Funny. She thought she’d be relieved.  
  
The kids have started a cheer at the front of the room, and the grannies are doing nothing to restrain them. “TO KING THOR AND GOOD QUEEN VAL,” they scream, and Thor catches her eye from across the room, both eyebrows raised.  
  
_I’ll tell you later_ , she mouths.  
  
*  
  
Later comes much later, after the kids have reluctantly gone to bed and the grannies are done rejoicing and complaining and generally reassuring themselves that an adult who has done the job of king before has been restored to the job, and then of course the pirates around the Iris nebula have to be dealt with. After all that, when it looks like smooth sailing for a few undisturbed hours, she takes Thor back to her room for a drink.

“What happened to you,” she asks, when they’re both settled on her bed with flagons of Raxian ale. “How did you survive?”  
  
Thor rubs his eyes. “There’s so much to tell you,” he says haltingly. “I hardly know where to start.”  
  
He embarks on a frankly unbelievable story about a mad Titan, a gauntlet of infinite power, and a quest for some magic rocks. It sounds more like a fairy tale than anything that could really happen to someone, but Thor looks exactly as weary as someone who lived it would look.  
  
“I’m glad Hulk is alive,” she says after a long minute, and she is.  
  
“Me too,” Thor says quietly. “I am glad all of you are still here. I thought when I first landed on the Commodore that Thanos had turned you to dust.” She remembers how close they came to selling the ship--the only place Thor would have known to look for them--and shudders. “Thank you, Sigyn. I owe you everything. _We_ owe you everything.”  
  
Only a year ago, she thinks wildly, she was a slaver. Only a year ago, she sold this man to the Grandmaster for ten million credits.

“Now,” he says. “I think perhaps you have a story to tell me?”  
  
“It’s your brother’s fault, really,” she says, and regrets it the next second, when a terrible hope kindles in Thor’s eyes.  
  
“You mean you’ve seen him?” he asks, too fast.  
  
“Not the way you mean,” she says, as gently as she can. She gives him a general picture as quickly and efficiently as possible, including Korg’s final theory. He listens in silence.

“Can I see the mark?” he asks when she finishes.  
  
She unbuckles her vambrace and shows it to him.  
  
“My mother had one just like it,” he says after a moment. “Some piece of her spinning magic. Loki must have taken it after she died. He was truly her heir.”  
  
“I don’t know why he wanted me to have it,” she says.  
  
“Nor do I,” Thor says heavily. “I suppose I must hope you are right, and that my brother has at last found peace. For his sake, I hope it is so.” A tight smile passes over his face, and she sees that his eyes are red. “Although I’m sorry I didn’t come an hour sooner.”  
  
She puts a hand on his arm, and the grief she only now realizes has gone unacknowledged must show on her face, because he lets out a very even breath, and looks at her.  
  
“Yeah,” she says, and drains her ale, tossing the empty flagon onto the floor. “All right.”  
  
They reach for each other in more or less the same moment.  
  
She finds herself shaking, slightly, and Thor soothes her by running his thumb over her ear and tugging her closer, one hand at the small of her back. She tries to press herself as close as she can get, cradling his head in her hands and deepening the kiss until he’s gasping against her mouth for air, and she starts working her way down his jaw.  
  
He gives a wild little laugh, and goes to take her hand in his--which is when his thumb brushes the rune on her wrist, and it _sparks._  
  
They both yelp and stare. It doesn’t hurt, per se--it felt like a brief electric shock, not like pain--but more importantly, the rune doesn’t look the _same_.  
  
“Is it--” she starts.  
  
“--Three dimensional?” Thor finishes, a nonplussed expression on his face.  
  
Half of the rune is still flat against her skin like a tattoo, but the little silver loop is standing up from her wrist, for all the world like it were a real piece of thread, albeit one that shone like a star. “Only one way to find out,” she says, and tugs at it.  
  
The thread pulls easily away from her wrist, a gleaming silver line drawing out of her arm and into her hand.  
  
“This,” Thor says blankly, “is extremely weird.”  
  
“You’re telling me,” she says. “Here--keep pulling. If we can get it out of me, I think I want it out of me.”  
  
She yanks at the thread, pulling out another foot or so of silver, and hands him the end. “It doesn’t hurt,” she assures him, and he gives the thread a dubious tug.  
  
She pulls, and Thor pulls, and endless spools of thread emerge from her arm, gradually thickening until they’re yanking out a thin but strong silver rope, piling up in shining coils on the floor around them, and they’re both trembling with the effort.  
  
“Do you feel like maybe--” Thor begins, the rope wrapped around both his hands, chafing the skin pink.  
  
“There’s something on the other side of this?” she asks, grimly. “Yes.” It feels like they’re trying to land a fish, or pull someone up from a very long height. “What did your mother do with her spinning magic, again?”  
  
“She made tapestries,” Thor says, panting. “Some of them were prophecy--they showed the past, present, or future, depending on the story she was trying to tell.”  
  
Bets on what kind of story this is, Valkyrie wants to ask, but she’s suddenly sure that this is the final effort, and it takes all her strength to just pull on the rope--at a certain point she’s just leaning back from Thor as hard as she can, while he hauls mightily, his face turning red.  
  
There’s a moment when she thinks it’s all been for nothing, and it won’t come loose. Then a crackle of lightning emerges from Thor’s hands, and sings down the rope, turning it into a hot and living thing in her grasp.  
  
They pull again together, and the rope comes free.    
  
She and Thor both crash into opposite walls of her bedroom with the force of it, and she cries out as something unnameable briefly passes through her--and then the rune vanishes completely from her skin, and Loki is standing between them, naked and alive.  
  
*  
  
It will occur to her later that the world ended three times, and it is very slowly putting itself back together.  
  
She’s not convinced any of them deserve it, but she’s stupidly fucking grateful.  
  
*  
  
After Thor more or less pulls himself together, and Loki drapes her bedspread over himself like it’s a soft green toga, and she pokes Loki repeatedly in the shoulder with her finger, her heart warming with his increasingly irritated looks, the three of them sit together on her bed. Thor keeps one hand on Loki at all times, as if to reassure himself that Loki is here and not a ghost. She picks up their scattered cups from the floor and refills them, carefully avoiding the shining heaps of starlight, still curled up around the room. Loki is shivering, and freezing cold, but otherwise triumphant.  
  
“No resurrections,” Loki is saying to Thor, with a spiteful smile directed at Thanos, somewhere on the other side of the universe. “No second chances. Who’s got the last word now?”  
  
Valkyrie pushes a cup into his hands, biting back a smile at the frigid brush of his fingers.  
  
“You have, I suppose,” Thor says, shaking his head. “I don’t understand how you did this.”

Valkyrie nods, and sits down crosslegged at the foot of the bed, her knee just barely touching Loki’s bare shin. Thor’s not the only one who’s glad Loki isn’t a ghost.  
  
“Well, you wouldn’t,” Loki says, resettling himself against Thor’s shoulder. “It was an elaborate and cunning stratagem, with pieces of the plan laid down years earlier.”  
  
“What part of your stratagem involved silently yelling at me for weeks on end, hoping I’d spontaneously develop the ability to read your mind?” Valkyrie asks, taking a sip of her ale.  
  
“Don’t get me started on you,” Loki says darkly. “You let children throw _grapes_ at my _head_ .”  
  
Thor coughs. “What?”  
  
“Seriously, though,” she says. “Explain.”  
  
Loki looks contemplative. “All right,” he says. “Do you remember when I gave you mother’s rune?” He leans forward and taps her wrist for good measure.

  
“The day a ghost almost killed me by surprising me in the shower?” she asks drily. “I have some memory of it.”  
  
He shakes his head. “I didn’t give it to you then. I only activated it. I _gave_ it to you months ago.”  
  
Valkyrie stares at him for a moment, and abruptly remembers the day they fucked in a closet and each accused the other of wanting Thor more. “You bit me,” she says slowly. “That was--?”  
  
“A gift,” Loki says carelessly. He looks right at her, and not at Thor, and she thinks it’s deliberate. “I realized I had many things belonging to Asgard still in my possession, and I wanted to distribute them where they would do the most good.”  
  
“You were planning to leave us,” Thor says in a low voice, his grip tightening on Loki’s shoulder.  
  
“Of course I was planning to leave you,” Loki says, and takes a long swallow of his drink. “There wasn’t any way I could remain on Midgard, after all.”  
  
“But why me?” Valkyrie asks, and gestures helplessly at the magical detritus abandoned around the room. “What use did you think I’d get out of this?”  
  
Loki shrugs. “It’s magic that belongs to the queen of Asgard,” he says. “You were the obvious candidate.”

Valkyrie stares at him, and he raises an eyebrow at her, pointedly. She _is_ the queen of Asgard--or she was, six hours ago. That part’s less clear now.  
  
“Good,” Thor says impatiently. “The mystery of Sigyn’s mark is explained. But how are you alive?”  
  
“I was getting to that,” Loki says. “So, all right, I found myself dead. Fair enough. But I had no intention of staying that way. Especially not after it got so crowded in there--you know half the galaxy died in a matter of minutes last month, don’t you?”  
  
“Half the universe,” Thor says, a muscle in his jaw clenching.  
  
“Either way: an unnatural state of affairs,” Loki says, and gets up from the bed, severing their contact. He starts pacing. Thor’s hands flex unhappily, and Valkyrie herself feels a sullen unease roll over her. “Not the kind of thing one likes to see. Even the dead. Even Death herself.”  
  
She sits up straight. “You mean Hela? She’s alive?”  
  
“Of course I mean Hela,” he says. “And don’t be absurd. No one could have survived Ragnarok. But she’s the goddess of Death, or _a_ goddess of Death. Obviously she’s made herself very much at home in hell. _So_ ,” he says, giving Thor a quelling look when Thor draws breath to speak, “she was understandably disturbed by the sudden chaos of her realm. In the disarray, I managed to steal her copy of the Book of the Dead.”  
  
Valkyrie sucks in a breath.  
  
“No one save Death can open that book,” Thor says, repeating what every child knows about the afterlife.  The souls of the dead are written in the book by Death, and afterward sent to their proper heavens and hells. There are stories of heroes convincing Death to scratch out their names and send them back, but never, as far as she knows, has anyone ever _stolen it outright_ .  
  
“Yes,” Loki says carefully. “It is impossible to open the book.”  
  
“You still have it, don’t you,” Thor says, with sick fascination. “Can anyone even _go_ to hell right now? Or are their souls just drifting uselessly in the void?”  
  
“Never you mind,” Loki replies with a cool grandeur that means Thor is absolutely right, which is horrifying. “Anyway. Just possessing the book gave me enough of a boost to send projections of myself back to the living world.”  
  
“But why did you send them to _me_ ?” she asks, coming back to the point.  
  
Loki gestures dismissively at the two of them, sitting side by side on the bed. “I was trapped in Hell itself,” he says. “Only the combined magic of the King and Queen of Asgard could bring me back.”  
  
Valkyrie stares at him incredulously, and after a moment decides she’s angry. Very angry. “You utter fool,” she says, and gets up from the bed herself. “You had no _idea_ that would ever happen. The queen thing was _dumb luck_ .”  
  
“I had every reason to believe it would happen,” Loki snaps. “Or didn’t I find you tangled up in bed together?”  
  
“You are a _fool_ ,” she repeats, righteous fury burning in her chest, and to prove it she takes two rapid steps forward and kisses him.  
  
He’s freezing at first--cold as a frost giant, cold as the grave--but he slowly warms under her touch, his hands coming up cautiously to cradle her head. She lets him go slowly, too, keeping her hands on his shoulders, and finds him staring down at her like he’s never seen her before.  
  
Thor makes a soft sound somewhere behind them, and Loki stiffens immediately under her hands.  
  
“Thor,” she says, not moving away from Loki--fisting one hand in the blanket, in fact, to keep him from running away-- “I think you should come over here.”  
  
Loki’s eyes go very wide when Thor does as she says. She can feel the heat of Thor’s body just behind her, close enough to touch.  
  
“The happy ending you wrote for us isn’t happening,” she says quietly, including Thor but speaking to Loki. “The one where we’re Asgard reborn and you go off by yourself again. That’s not an option.”  
  
“No,” Thor agrees, and puts a hand on her shoulder, a visible act of support. “It’s not.” Loki’s eyes redden slightly at the rims.  
  
“For one thing, Asgard is still a collection of frightened children and old women,” she continues, leaning back into Thor’s warmth, pulling Loki along with her. “Hardly a power that can stand on its own, even with two champions.”  
  
“For another,” Thor says, and reaches over her to grip Loki’s shoulder, low and intense, “You aren’t leaving us again.”    
  
“I returned from the dead barely an hour ago,” Loki says in a shaken voice. “Ultimatums hardly seem fair.”  
  
“Fuck fair,” she says, and kisses him again.  
  
“They have a saying on Sakaar,” Loki says after a while. “I don’t know if either of you’ve heard it in your travels. YOLO. Not exactly true, in my case, but the sentiment seems--”  He doesn’t quite finish, distracted by her mouth.  
  
“They have it on Midgard,” Thor says between kisses, a kind of answer. “#YOLO.”  
  
“YOLO,” Valkyrie agrees, and strips off her shirt.  
  
*  
  
“Let me get this straight,” Korg says, for the fifth time, standing guard over the control room.  
  
“We’ve been over this,” Valkyrie says, with less calm than she’d answered him the first four times. “Thor’s back, Loki’s back, Loki stole the Book of the Dead from the Goddess of Death, and if we can locate the eternal flame burning somewhere in the ruins of Asgard, we can burn it up.”  
  
“Hela’s only been dead herself for about a year, so this particular Book only features one year’s worth of dead people,” Thor clarifies helpfully. “There’s no need to fear bringing back all the dead in the history of the universe in one giant zombie flood. But we can resurrect Thanos’s victims.”  
  
“And incidentally, anyone else who’s died since Hela did,” Valkyrie finishes, smiling at him. “So--everyone who died on the Ark, for one.”  
  
“There might be collateral damage there,” Thor allows, “given that we also killed many hundreds of Thanos’s lieutenants, but saving the universe does seem worth the trade.”  
  
“Not that,” Korg says, waving it away. “I got that. I mean let me get _this_ \--” he gestures between the two of them and Loki, currently yelling at a huddle of children busily throwing peanut shells at him “--straight. You’re saying you’re still the queen, and he’s the king, and _he’s_ the prince, and all three of you are doing the do?”  
  
“To be fair, we didn’t actually _say_ that,” Thor says staunchly, but since Korg was the one who opened her bedroom door and found them all collapsed in bed together that morning, she’s willing to concede the point.  
  
“Wow,” Korg says. “Okay. I guess there wasn’t an innocent explanation after all. Sorry, Miek.”  
  
“Yes, sorry, Miek,” Thor says.  
  
“Enough talk,” Loki says as he comes up to them, fishing a peanut shell out of the open collar of his shirt. “The sooner we can dump the book, the sooner we can kill Thanos.”  
  
Valkyrie leans past Korg, and punches the coordinates into the navigation controls. “All right, then,” she says. “Let’s go be heroes.”  
  
They both smile at her--Loki grudgingly, and Thor broadly. She hits the big red button that means _go_ , and the universe comes rushing at them.

**Author's Note:**

> I know she's Brunnhilde in the comics, but she's unnamed in the movies, so I can do what i want. Just sayin. 
> 
> Any and all feedback is terribly appreciated. <3


End file.
